Multiligualism

ABSTRACT

Ever since the oil boom of the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and the countries on the western coast of the Arab Gulf, i.e. Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, and Qatar, have been witnessing both a significant increase in their non-national labour force and considerable urbanization. Most of the immigrant workers come from South and South-East Asia, with smaller number of expatriates from other regions. The overwhelming majority of these foreign workers live and work in the cities, which have thus become not only a meeting place of speakers of a variety of languages, but also a linguistic laboratory in which a new means of interethnic communication, generally known as Gulf Pidgin Arabic, has emerged in approximately the last 40 years. The present paper describes the main features of the phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of this still under researched pidgin. Also discussed are the various sources of these features: the speakers’ first languages, the Foreigner Talk register of Arabic, grammaticalization, Gulf Arabic, and English.

RESUMEN

“Trabajadores inmigrantes y formación de la lengua: el pidgin del Golfo Pérsico”

Desde el boom del petróleo de los años setenta, Arabia Saudí y los países de la costa oeste del Golfo Pérsico, i.e. Kuwait, Emiratos Árabes Unidos, Omán, Baréin y Catar, han conocido un aumento significativo tanto de la mano de obra inmigrante como de la urbanización. La mayoría de los trabajadores inmigrantes viene del sur y del sudeste de Asia, existiendo un pequeño número de expatriados de otras regiones. La apabullante mayoría de estos trabajadores extranjeros vive y trabaja en las ciudades, que se han convertido no solamente en un lugar de encuentro para los hablantes de distintas lenguas, sino también en un laboratorio lingüístico donde un nuevo tipo de comunicación entre las diferentes etnias, generalmente conocido como pidgin del Golfo Pérsico, ha aparecido en, aproximadamente, los últimos cuarenta años. Este artículo describe las características principales de la fonología, morfología, sintaxis y léxico de este pidgin poco investigado. El trabajo también trata las diferentes fuentes de estas características: las lenguas maternas de los hablantes, los registros del árabe como lengua extranjera, la gramaticalización, el árabe del Golfo y el inglés.

Vollzitat: Tamara Scheer, Die Sprachenvielfalt in der österreichisch-ungarischen Armee während des Ersten Weltkriegs Mobilisierung und Kriegserfahrung, in: Marijan Bobinac, Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Jelena Spreicer, Mehrsprachigkeit in Imperien. Multilingualism in Empires, Leykam, Zagreb, 2019), 231-260.

Ver las versiones del hiperpoema multilingüe y sus traducciones monolingües publicadas sobre papel en el sitio https://www.raphel.net
Versión 2005. Ensayo-ficción de Bernardo Schiavetta, "Fragmentos de un poema babélico", publicado en la revista Hablar de Poesía, Buenos Aires, año 2005, nº14, p. 40-51. Se trata de un texto de creación en forma de ensayo-ficción. Proyecto en curso todavía en 2020. Diversas versiones del Almiraphel, poema babélico, han sido publicadas en  revistas y libros (sobre todo en francés).Ver las otras versiones en esta misma sección. Argumento: uno o dos heterónimos de Bernardo Schiavetta escriben un poema que trata sobre Nemrod, el constructor de la Torre de Babel, tal como lo presenta Dante en la Divina Comedia (Inferno, canto XXXI). El poema babélico habla babélicamente de Babel. La "lengua babélica" es un idioma imaginario, constituido por citas (auténticas) de frases en más de 7O lenguas distintas. Se trata de un centón plurilingüe (o collage multilingüe).  Esta es la primera publicación del poema babélico en castellano (babélico  + traducción) precedida de una ficción sobre su escritura, que comienza como un poema dadaísta fechado en 1916. La versión definitiva del poema, acompañada de la historia novelesca de sus autores imaginarios es "la novela de Carmen y Bruno" anunciada en el prefacio "Jugar en serio" de la antología personal de Schiavetta, Antes de los apócrifos, Buenos Aires, Audisea, 2018.

This article discusses Volume 17 (1) where the editors (Garrido and Sabaté-Dalmau) push for a sociolinguistic, discourse-analytic and linguistic anthropological agenda in the study of transnational trajectories of multilingual workers and emergent entrepreneurial selves. I review this lens as suitable to document how language both mediates and becomes object of explicit attention/talk in institutionalised arrangements and subject-formation processes that enable such arrangements. In doing so, I focus on the alignments of market rationality, sovereignty, and citizenship that emerge across the articles in the volume, with focus on how they mutually constitute distinctive milieus of labour and life at the edge of emergence. I propose to think of these alignments via Ong's (2006. Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press.) analysis of variegated modes of neoliberal governmentality to articulate the set of paradoxes and contradictions identified by the authors of such articles. This, I argue, necessitates a kaleidoscopic framing of neoliberalism whereby the analysis of semiosis goes hand-in-hand with attention to dynamics of mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. I also suggest that such an exploration may also benefit from in-depth engagement with developments stemming from the spatial turn, for they help us map specific trajectories onto the patterns of global circulation of professionals, ideas about language, and resources.

This chapter will provide an overview of the intersections between language and social justice in greater China. Like many nation-states that were either created or reshaped in the twentieth century, the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), Singapore and Hong Kong have all established language policies. In practice, the actual use of language does not always match that of the language policy, as law, policy, attitudes and practice intertwine. In response to these language policies, the twenty-first century has witnessed significant social movements involving resistance to the standardization and domination of languages.

In this chapter, I demonstrate that the Translingual approach can be applied to monolingual and multilingual students. My analysis of a text written by a "mainstream" student in response to an "alternative" text ("How to Tame a Wild Tongue") demonstrates the possibilities (and challenges) of working from a translingual starting point when responding to all student texts, including texts written by so-called monolingual as well as multilingual students. I propose relocalized listening as a way to rhetorically listen to all student texts.

Senegal is a West African country that is highly diverse and multilingual on a societal and individual level. Multilingualism is used in most interactions of peoples' everyday lives in a translanguaging fashion. Yet, beside some small efforts, the only official language in the institutional sector and education remains French. However, educational systems and language policies do not reflect the reality of the people they are created for since monolingualism often only plays a minor role in their lives. Based on empirical data collected in the Casamance, this article focuses in particular on these issues through displaying multilingualism as an adapting system that moves within the social environments while integrating different languages, intermixed in a way that is appropriate for its speakers in respective situations. On the basis of case examples, concepts are presented for the reinforcement of multilingualism with potential to strengthen local languages and cultures from the inside out.

MULTINOVEL.
Dialogues on the multilingual novel with contemporary authors

Università Ca' Foscari Venezia
Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies
in collaboration with Incroci di Civiltà


A dialogue with
GINA APOSTOL
moderated by Alessandro Raveggi, Università Ca’ Foscari

Friday APRIL 16, 2021, 5 PM (Rome CET), ONLINE

MULTINOVEL is a series of dialogues on multilingualism in the novel form with contemporary authors from the Americas to Europe, curated by Università Ca’ Foscari research fellow and author Alessandro Raveggi.

MULTINOVEL aims to reflect on the topic and its theoretical consequences, fostering an interdisciplinary debate with the help of the genuine voice of internationally renowned authors.

The event (in English) will be online on Zoom.

Registration required at this link: https://unive.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMtfuCsrTwjGta_RYhoENiHOxZaDsHyjuGw

GINA APOSTOL grew up in the Philippines and lives in New York, where she writes her novels on revolution and language, power and translation, storytelling and history. Her most recent work has focused on the Philippine-American war and acts of narration as forms of invention and liberation. Her fourth novel, Insurrecto, was named by Publishers' Weekly one of the Ten Best Books of 2018. Her third book, Gun Dealers' Daughter, won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others.

This presentation considers the use of multiple languages in the songs of the ongoing war in Donbas, in eastern Ukraine. In examining how and to what end different languages are employed in these songs, I seek to shed light on the underlying assumptions about the languages involved and about the communities using them. The key language combination examined in this article is that of Russian and Ukrainian, which are the two languages most commonly used in the songs under study. I compare the strategies of multilingual songwriting utilized by predominantly or originally Russophone Ukrainian artists to those used by their Ukrainophone Ukrainian counterparts, revealing significant differences between the two. While Russophone artists employ multilingualism in their songs as a way of signaling a pro‐Ukrainian position in the war, their Ukrainophone counterparts largely resort to multilingual expression to cast the Russian language as the language of the enemy. This divergence makes it possible to speak of at least two distinct strategies or varieties of multilingualism in the songs of the War in Donbas. I explore these key trends both through the corpora of multilingual artists and through individual songs written in more than one language.

Abstract. Coherence and alignment of the legislative language highly contribute to the quality of legislative processes, to the clarity of legislative texts and to their accessibility. DALOS aims at ensuring that legal drafters and decision-makers have control over the multilingual language of European legislation, and over the linguistic and conceptual issues involved in its transposition at national levels. The project will contribute to this goal by providing law-makers with linguistic and knowledge management tools to support the legislative drafting activity.

Abstract. Coherence and alignment of the legislative language highly contribute to the quality of legislative processes, to the clarity of legislative texts and to their accessibility. DALOS aims at ensuring that legal drafters and decision-makers have control over the multilingual language of European legislation, and over the linguistic and conceptual issues involved in its transposition at national levels. The project will contribute to this goal by providing law-makers with linguistic and knowledge management tools to support the legislative drafting activity.

Past studies have explored the role of student science notebooks in supporting students' developing science understandings. Yet scant research has investigated science notebook use with students who are learning science in a language they are working to master. To explore how student science notebook use is co-constructed in interaction among students and teachers, this study examined plurilingual students' interactions with open-ended science notebooks during an inquiry science unit on condensation and evaporation. Grounded in theoretical views of the notebook as a semiotic social space, multimodal interaction analysis facilitated examination of the ways students drew upon the space afforded by the notebook as they constructed explanations of their understandings. Cross-group comparison of three focal groups led to multiple assertions regarding the use of science notebooks with plurilingual students. First, the notebook supported student-determined paths of resemiotization as students employed multiple communicative resources to express science understandings. Second, notebooks provided spaces for students to draw upon diverse language resources and as a bridge in time across multiple inquiry sessions. Third, representations in notebooks were leveraged by both students and teachers to access and deepen conceptual conversations. Lastly, students' interactions over time revealed multiple epistemological orientations in students' use of the notebook space. These findings point to the benefits of open-ended science notebooks use with plurilingual students, and a consideration of the ways they are used in interaction in science instruction.

This study draws on the experience of 4-7-year-old Year 1 pupils learning to read and write in English and French for the first time in two Anglophone and two Francophone primary schools in Cameroon. It uses focus group and individual interviews to elicit pupils’ views about their experience of language learning in and out of the classroom and teachers’ perception regarding children’s language use in school. A participant observation approach was useful in following up pupils’ language practice in the playground in the schools studied. 
    While a ban on using Pidgin English permeated English speaking pupils’  perception of the relevant language to use in school, teachers’ insistence on the use of the official language contributed to the inhibition of pupils’ mother tongue and the misconstruction of its value. However, pupils’ views showed their attachment to these languages due to their using them at home with relatives. While language in education policy seems to be slowly changing, teachers’ perception of the appropriate language as medium of education remains stuck in the colonial past . The study thus highlights the divide between home and school languages in this particular multilingual socialisation context and problematizes the Cameroon government’s official bilingualism construct.